Day Three—Friday

Yeah, now I was hitting my stride. So was everyone else. Friday at the War for the Cooks’ Camp generally means Fish Friday (so very medieval), though there’s no requirement to do it if you’re not into fish. Since dried octopus wasn’t to be found (to make Transylvanian octo-lutefisk), I elected to stay in camp and start early rather than later. Also unusually, we weren’t having our formal dinner that night…one of our regulars was having a wedding and we all didn’t want to show up with dishpan hands.

So, with an early start, and a little extra cool time, I figured this was the time to do my Bonus Project. My Bonus Projects are extra, cooking related times when I try to work out some period techniques by doing. Last year, I tried grinding grain with a stone quern, and also, with Armin’s help, tried to use a cow’s horn to stuff sausage. Before that, I used the nearby ocean to make a jar of Sel d’Guerre (the Salt of War). This time…I was going to try to tin my giant riveted cauldron.

Yeah, that’s it there. I previously cleaned it out with a wire brush on a drill. On this day, I used a nice coating of flux, and built a pretty good fire in my firebox. And there was my first problem. Unlike a real medieval tinsmith, I couldn’t build a BIG fire, or spread it out much, and every little breeze that wasn’t stopped by the walls I didn’t have took my heat with it. I was eventually able to melt the tin in the very bottom, but only by putting the cauldron right down into the coals, and then using a blowpipe to supercharge the coals.

So I tried wiping the molten tin around while simultaneously letting it cool. Not…wholly effective, I’m afraid. I even used a butane torch in my culinary toolkit (yes, I know, not medieval, so sue me) to spot heat. I ended up with the below:

Oh, well. That band around the top? Too thick, and it didn’t really bond. Hey, no biggie. It can be peeled off and remelted (tin, by the way, melts around 450F). But see that patch very vaguely like Australia below that? THAT is the way it’s supposed to be. Thin, bonded to the pot and smooth. So we’ll revisit this project in the future. People were coming out to do some cooking, and rather than drive them away with fumes from the flux, I decided to get back to real cooking too.

So, to the food! Rummaging around in my ice chest, I came up with a goodly little beef chuck roast. Therefore, time to pull up the beef recipes.

First, beef with sorrel. I confess, this one was almost too easy to do. But I was curious as to how it would taste.

Eighteenth. (17) Beef with sorrel.

Wash the sorrel and add a lot of it, it gives the meat a sour taste. When the meat is cooking, add the sorrel and add some black pepper.

Like the other recipes around it, I rinsed off the beef (our author was big on beef being clean), salted it well, then half-cooked it on the grill to get a little caramelization. I then sliced it up and put it into a pipkin with some beef broth and started that simmering. After it had been going a while, I added pepper and opened my jar of sorrel. What? Yes, well, while I had hoped to be able to use fresh sorrel leaves for this (they look a bit like baby spinach), the folks who had it weren’t able to bring it. So I had as backup, a jar of it, sort of like baby food. Since it was going to get cooked down anyway…

It’s too late to make a long story short, but that’s how you adapt. And it was pretty tasty. The beef shouldn’t have been grilled so long, and it would have been better if it was less lean, but the fresh-sour taste of the sorrel came through just fine, and flavored the beef well. A lot of folks who came through camp tried it, and no one ran screaming.

With the other half of the roast…

The seventh with beef.

(7) CHOKED ROASTED BEEF.

Wash the beef, put it into a skewer, and roast it like I said before. When it’s half-done, beat it. Be sure to catch its drippings in a pot. Cut into pieces, as many as you would want to serve.

When it’s in the pot, put a small loaf of white bread next to it; don’t peel it just clean it13, then add some juniper berries, but not too many, and do not crush them. Add some sage, and a little onion for the flavor. If it looks to you that the beef does not have enough liquid, add some beef broth. If you have lemon juice, add some; if you have none, you can use vinegar, but do not make it too vinegary. Find a lid for the pot, put it on, and then seal it well with paste , but make sure you have added some black pepper and everything else it needs because once you have sealed it you can’t open it again. When you want to serve it, put all the meat and much of the sauce on the serving dish, but do not include the loaf of bread because it does not belong there.

I wasn’t sure about beating it, but I used my meat-bat, and indeed, it gave me more meat drippings, though I still had to add plenty of beef broth. I used a lemon, about 10 juniper berries, and a dozen or so sage leaves. I did forget the onion (doh!), added the bread, and pepper, and sealed it all in a pipkin I was given to test with some flour-water dough.

Simmered it about an hour, thinking that the dough seal would help it act like one of my beloved pressure cookers. Alas, the meat didn’t end up being terribly tender (fattier would have been better), and the sauce…well, it was okay, but it wasn’t a favorite. The juniper berries reacted with the acid to make the sage leaves kind of…bitter. This was the first Transylvanian dish I didn’t really care for…though maybe the missing onion could have performed some alchemy and made it delicious. Or maybe not. The pipkin, by the way, worked way better than I thought, given how light weight it was, and unglazed.

Last dish (I SAID I was busy!) was fried raisins.

(783) Frying raisins.

Soak the raisins in wine so they will be swollen; make batter from this wine, dip the raisins into the dough, for if they weren’t wet, the dough would fall off.

I started this first to get the raisins soaking. I had about a pound of golden raisins, put them into a canister, and poured some red wine over them to cover. I bought the golden raisins because they were on special, and the bottle of red wine was already open, that’s why.

After a couple hours, the raisins were plumped up (overnight might have been better), I poured off the wine into a bowl, added an egg to the cup and a half of wine there, and stirred in flour to make a thick batter. Meanwhile, I melted butter in one of my ceramic skillets. When it was all ready, I dumped the raisins back into the batter to coat them, and scooped them up, a few at a time, to put into the hot butter.

Okay, first, the butter was a salted butter. While the first several of these were awfully salty, most everyone who tried them that way liked the contrast of the salt, the wine, and the sweet raisins. Second, honest, the butter should have been hotter. Nothing got crisp (not that it was required). Last…the red wine batter when fried…looked like lumps of raw beef. Really. That put a few people off, but honest, these made a great bar-snack, and went terribly, terribly well with Ivar’s sangria. I’ll make these again, but you know, with white wine.

And yes, Aram kept working on the oven, with help.